Jfk: Fact And Fiction

December 22, 1991|By TOM WICKER

More than halfway into JFK, Oliver Stone`s three-hour movie about the assassination of President Kennedy, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his wife, Liz, are seen watching a television documentary about Garrison`s investigation of the events of Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

The documentary`s anchorman is heard charging that the district attorney used improper methods to get witnesses to support his case against the New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for his part in a supposed conspiracy surrounding the murder of President Kennedy.

Kevin Costner, portraying Garrison, suggests by facial expression and dialogue that the charge is unfair and rigged to destroy his credibility -- thus attacking the credibility of the documentary.

Frequently in JFK, the district attorney alleges that the media are engaged in a cover-up of a monstrous conspiracy, which Stone confidently depicts as having resulted in the assassination of a president, the war in Vietnam, the later killing of Robert Kennedy, perhaps even the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is a measure of Stone`s heavily weighted storytelling that he gives only a fleeting glimpse of that one-hour documentary, which was broadcast by NBC on June 19, 1967.

Its evidence - the script is available - establishes without doubt that Garrison and his aides threatened and bribed witnesses, who then lied in court, and that they concealed the results of a polygraph test that showed one witness, Vernon Bundy, to be lying.

So much for the advertising for the Stone film, which proclaims of Garrison: ``He will risk his life, the lives of his family, everything he holds dear for the one thing he holds sacred -- the truth.``

STONE`S HERO DISCREDITED

In fact, of all the numerous conspiracy theorists and zealous investigators who for nearly 30 years have been peering at and probing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Garrison may be the most thoroughly discredited -- and not just by the NBC documentary.

His ballyhooed investigation ended ignominiously when his chosen villain, Clay Shaw, was acquitted; and the whole Garrison affair is now regarded, even by other conspiracy believers, as having been a travesty of legal process.

Despite all this, Jim Garrison is clearly the film`s hero. He is played by Costner, one of Hollywood`s hottest box-office attractions, fresh from his triumph in Dances With Wolves. Sissy Spacek plays his wife, and in an arrogant bit of casting against type, the real-life Garrison makes a cameo appearance as Chief Justice Earl Warren.

JFK, which opened on Friday, stirred controversy last summer when a draft of Stone and Zachary Sklar`s screenplay found its way to the news media. Based chiefly on Garrison`s 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, it adopts his argument that Lee Harvey Oswald -- the lone presidential assassin, according to the Warren Commission -- was merely a patsy put forward to shield the actions of an immense body of conspirators involved in the murder and coverup.

The controversy arose over fears that the film would develop a web of speculation and fiction around a tragic event of major historic significance. And indeed, it does treat matters that are wholly speculative as fact and truth, in effect rewriting history.

Stone built into his movie an all-encompassing defense. As in the scene of the television documentary, the film`s Jim Garrison repeatedly says that any critics of his thesis are either part of the great conspiracy he has conceived or are helping to cover it up. The only one of his assistants who argues and disagrees with him is shown to have been coerced by the FBI, a primary participant in Garrison`s sprawling conspiracy.

But there`s a gaping hole in the movie`s advance counterattack: If a conspiracy as vast and consequential as the one claimed could have been carried out and covered up for three decades, why did the conspirators or their heirs allow Stone to make this movie? Why not murder him, as they supposedly murdered others? Why, for that matter, didn`t they knock off Garrison himself when -- as Stone tells it with so much assurance -- the New Orleans district attorney began so fearlessly to follow their trail?

FILM IMPLICATES LBJ

JFK begins with real footage of President Eisenhower`s farewell address, in which he eloquently warned of the dangers of the ``military-industri al complex.`` This sets up Stone`s contention -- borrowed, or swallowed whole, from Garrison -- that generals, admirals and war profiteers so strongly wanted the war in Vietnam to be fought and the United States to stand tall and tough against the Soviets that when President Kennedy seemed to question these goals, he had to be killed so Vice President Johnson could take office. Stone clearly implies that this was done with Johnson`s connivance.